Doonesbury by Garry Trudeau for April 20, 2009

Keeping down with the Joneses.

More like “trying to stay afloat with the Jonses”.

Yep, I’ve been working 15 hours per week for a year, now. We had already cut back before it hit. Thank you Mr. Bush. Still get tickled by the unintelligentia who call asking for donations.

Be happy yukoneric, I been unemployed since dec 31, 2007! Just try and pay your rent and payments and eat too… Bush & his party has trigged more woe to americans than all the wars combined..

What a country, eh? Even the poor are rich and on a radio show. I mean, Furbitor, unemployed since December 31, 2007, and you still have the wherewithal to make comments about comic strips on the internet! It could be worse, and probably will be, especially for your children and grandchildren, under Obama’s spending spree. He makes Bush look like a piker.

If you spent a million dollars a day every day since Jesus was born, you’d have the cost of the stimulus package. Now, quadruple that and you have the cost of the war in Iraq. That’s some “piker.”

Did Elmont get those bile green gloves out of the White House Dumpster? They look suspiciously like the ones Michelle wore to the inauguration, ruining an otherwise decent ensemble.

In thinking about Furbitor’s comment, I was amazed that despite all the things that Bush did, millions of people voted for his clone, McCain.

draculadave - the majority of people are mediocre or worse. That’s why the “bell curve” works when you figure statistics. That’s why it’s so frightening to contemplate pure majority rule. That’s also why deciding issues by referendum is usually not a good idea.

NotFromIceland (Hey, does that mean you really are from Iceland?); You won’t get any argument from me over the cost of the Iraq war. It was a colossal waste of money, material, time, AND HUMAN LIFE!! The US had no business invading that country, and certainly has no business doing nation building there. But, the super increase in spending by the Obama administration is no good either. It will pauperize our children and grandchildren - possibly even destroy the US. If you take the total debt plus proposed spending, it adds up to something like 75 Trillion dollars! Last year, the total GNP for the whole world was something akin to 73 Trillion dollars! You simply cannot spend your way out of debt, even if you can print your own money. That will accelerate the process. I confess, I don’t know the solution, and I hope Obama’s approach works, but I think it will turn out bad if we continue down the planned path.

NotFromIceland, that exact same equation (I guess you would call it that) was in a Clay Bennet cartoon last month I believe. Still a great point!

To DeeBerg13:

Obama is spending less money than Bu–sh–. But he is doing it openly and investing in America’s future instead of sending it to his cronies by way of Itraq.

Penguinassassin007: I hope you’re not really a penguin assassin, just as I’m not really from Iceland (I’m also not from a couple other places) – I have to confess, that cartoon is where I got the info from. There’s no hiding on the Internet.

That “million dollars a day since Christ was born” bit was debunked within two days of it hitting the wires. Do research. But then, anyone who thinks intelligently applied deficit spending can’t get us out of this hole we’re in has paid ZERO attention to history. It’s the ONLY way we have, bar none.

I did in fact do research, and I am right. You could look at politifact.com – which is about the most neutral checking site for politics/economics you can get – and it says the the numbers in the “since Jesus” timeline add up within a few tens of millions of dollars, which ain’t bad over 2,000 years. For further confirmation you can go to associatedcontent.com, a center-left site, which comes to much the same conclusion. So, I give your injunction back to you: Do research! In any case, my point was not that Obama’s stimulus plan was misguided, but rather that people who complain about his deficits never seemed to be worried about the much larger deficits Dubya ran up, and for a stupid purpose. I am pleased that we seem to agree that deficit spending is the only way out of the hole.

Hmmm - I’m not from Iceland either, now that I think about it. Like I said, “I hope Obama’s approach works…”, But, as BlueRaven says, “intelligently applied deficit spending…” - Let us fervently hope and pray that Obama and his team are exactly that - intelligent. Time will tell, time will tell…

Now these comments are interesting reading in 2017.